A Plea for European Conflict Rules on Proprietary Security

Ole Lando – to whom this paper is dedicated – has enriched mainly two legal fields: the comparison and unification of the conflict of laws and of substantive contract law. His work and his publications have centred on the European aspects of these two fields. It is therefore appropriate to offer a few ideas on a branch of the European conflict of laws that so far has found little attention – but, in the author’s view, not only deserves, but requires more attention: European conflict rules on movable property.The necessity of such European conflict rules on proprietary security rights is not new. In fact, they have been debated since the middle of the 1960s, soon after the creation of the Common Market. The Association of European Banks elaborated even a draft Convention on rules dealing with the extraterritorial effects of foreign non-possessory pledges. However, all these efforts failed – primarily, one may assume, because the Romanic countries were not willing to recognize non-possessory, but unregistered security rights in assets imported from other member states. The existing or planned Rome Regulations – from I to V – deal or plan to deal with various matters. But property is not (yet?) mentioned.This contribution is published in this Research Paper Series as a part of the Liber Amicorum Ole Lando with the generous and exceptional permission of the rights owner, Djof Forlag.